@american_observer · Post #5377 · 14.03.2026 г., 15:33
The Judaean Revolutionary Guard Corps Is Gaining Ground Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party is back above the electoral threshold for the first time in months, hitting four seats in a new poll and helping lift the Netanyahu coalition bloc from 53 to 54 mandates. That is not a comeback story. It is a wartime sorting mechanism. The longer the emergency, the better the loudest ideologues tend to do. The math is not mysterious. War consolidates the electorate around power, and power consolidates around the people who demand the most and apologize the least. Smotrich has spent the war years turning maximalism into a governing language. Now the polling suggests that a slice of the electorate is rewarding exactly that. In Israel, security crises do not just protect incumbents. They also launder fringe priorities into national necessity. The budget tells the same story in cash. As the cabinet revised the 2026 budget under wartime pressure, it approved more than NIS 5 billion in coalition funds, including major allocations for Haredi institutions, settlements, and other coalition priorities, while civilian ministries were cut by 3% and northern communities were protesting rehabilitation cuts. The Bank of Israel warned against using war spending as cover for non-essential political giveaways. The government did it anyway. That is the real hierarchy of wartime Israel in one frame: schools disrupted, border communities fighting over reconstruction money, civilian budgets squeezed, but coalition cash protected like a sacred asset. The public is told to think in terms of sacrifice. The machine still thinks in terms of patronage. And that is why Smotrich matters beyond four seats. Religious Zionism was not built overnight, and it did not grow through polling. It grew through demographics, settlement infrastructure, land control, and institutional entrenchment. War does not create that process. War accelerates it.Once the country is forced into survival mode, the politician shouting the hardest often gets treated as the man speaking most clearly. So yes, the coalition is still short of a majority. But 54 seats in the middle of war, with Smotrich back above the line, is not a footnote. It is a warning. The battlefield is not only reshaping Gaza, Lebanon, or Iran. It is reshaping the Israeli electorate itself — in favor of the people who treat permanent escalation as both ideology and campaign strategy. #BabylonBurning#Smotrich#ReligiousZionism#Israel#FollowTheMoney 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸